Far Cry 4 is about a man returning home to scatter his mother's final earthly form. Only he gets distracted, goes mountain climbing for a bit, helps dismantle a despotic regime, fights a tiger, runs in circles looking for an ancient scroll, lands a gyrocopter on someone's house and develops a caustic vendetta against nature's sweet-sounding fur demon, the honey badger.

This doesn't make him an absent-minded son so much as the protagonist in an excellent open-world game. Like the vessel enshrining his mother's ashes, Ajay Ghale can't accomplish anything without a player to move him, lugging him up and down South Asian mountains in pursuit of peril and the next exotic vista. And like Ghale, you get in so deep after a while that it doesn't really matter what brought you there in the first place.

You get just a novel snippet of peace in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. In this shooter's future, technology has trumped terrorism, rooted out the last evil masterminds and flexed its bionic muscles in total defiance of lead-footed politicians who'd rather talk than get things done. "The world is running out of bad guys," your partner says, hopeful but tragically unaware that he's basically describing a video game glitch. Call of Duty never runs out of bad guys.

This one gets points for honesty, though, in that there is no pretentious cover-up of why the good guys beat the bad guys (or why the plot finds them easily interchangeable). In Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, you win because you have better guns, stronger sights, super abilities and superior movement. Whether it's in the rich and varied multiplayer mode, or the frantic, thrill-a-minute single-player campaign, you're constantly relying on cool weapons and combat data to make taking lives easier. Advanced Warfare front-loads the benefits of power in a franchise that has always made technology the exalted, almost fetishized solution to every problem. And you know what? It's more fun when it admits as much.

The advanced technology in Watch Dogs is not just indistinguishable from magic – it IS magic. The game would have you believe you're the world's most powerful hacker, bending surveillance cameras, traffic control and all manner of personal electronics to your one-touch whims. But in this paranoid vision of the future, in which every mundane device is grafted to the same computerized skeleton, the right software might as well be an all-powerful wand.

It's a pleasure being lost in the universe of Metal Gear. With every game, and with every return of director Hideo Kojima, the fascinating stealth series redraws the boundaries of its dense military fiction, pushing them back to include more and more characters and conspiracies. We feel like time-travelers in Metal Gear's byzantine blend of fact and fiction, leaping back and forth between the future and past of a legendary soldier named Snake. Now we enter 1975 in Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes, and bless its prequel heart – there's a spot in the statistics screen reserved for time paradoxes.

Kojima's fiction may be impenetrable to the newcomer, but one man's convoluted is another man's complex, and it's your job to infiltrate the latter. Ground Zeroes effectively acts as the cold open for the upcoming and separately released Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, sending Snake through a massive rain-drenched encampment in Cuba. It's not quite the glorified demo your cynical self might suggest, but this tantalizing playground does show how Metal Gear Solid will change its crouching silhouette yet again.

The mission to rescue Chico and the duplicitous Paz, two important figures from Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, is just the first step in a new, freely explorable environment. It feels daunting at first, but clear goals keep you pointed in the right direction. Ground Zeroes is a confident game for the confident player – the one who sees the playground hiding beneath Metal Gear's tankers and army bases. This one's just a whole lot bigger.

Titanfall is strictly coiled around the player. You couldn't excise even one piece without slackening it like a ruined kidnapper's rope. The serpentine level design, the liberating sense of movement, the flawless controls and yes, the enormous bipedal tanks dropping from the sky, are equally indispensable in this arresting shooter.

Given the studio's splintered status as a former Call of Duty custodian, Respawn Entertainment has made a multiplayer game fit for those who have spent years peering through the eyes of a speedy killing machine – a seasoned six against six in battles for land or a higher kill count. A history with rapid-fire aim and fleet-footed 3D movement is not essential here, but recommended.

With this letter I have enclosed a large, slightly frayed chunk of styrofoam that we all thought resembled the prominent "t" in the Engadget logo – you know, the one wearing the cute Wi-Fi hat. We have no use for this item here at Joystiq, so we thought you might hoist it above your reeking desk-beds, or use it in another story about 3D printers.